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Poetry

I have no tolerance for hope. Hope survives
on leftovers and unwilling loss: a soiled casket of
emptiness for every six feet of paragraph
it wades behind. Hope stuffs itself between the words
and the meaning, loudly camouflaged by
gambling and cigarettes, declining to altercate but
lathered by a demand to be seen. It shuns you,
but needs you desirable, a voyeurist: a
lap dancing ghost to keep it current.
Hope is a pimp
and you whore yourself to keep it primed,
shedding your skin like a puree of missing passports,
onion tears soaking sensibility after raw
sensibility, riding hope faster than your hips can keep up,
because, and after all,
there has to be a better place than this.
Time is just an expanse to harness,
a mount for crossing –
and you must wager everything,
from soul to sex
to grind it hard to a halt.

But true adventure lay between a frozen boundary of
stony words. Between a synchronism of dishonest friendship
and the cowardice of being alone.

Poetry is animal without tongue or limb and it
bellows wildly in dormant pursuit.
It flowers only to write of
hand grenades that fall like alphabet stars;
pollen, like acid rain.
It flourishes in drama of silent depth
as wound commits to scar.

Sometimes it touches
and perhaps we might call it rape
but all it ever seeks is our forgiveness,
an atoned pardon for not arriving
– for not stampeding us –
any sooner than it had.

Like this:

Am I brave enough yet to emerge,
to escape the regret,
to dismantle,
forget,
to demolish the surge of this
plundering ache,
to curb
and to conquer
and famish the quaking;
this suffering silence;
this violent breath taking.
Am I whole enough yet
to prohibit the shaking,
snaking my flesh with
its mandible gaping,
and I,
an invertebrate
sensing
it
raking
its
claws
like it’s tilling
a field in my pause.

– I AM –

I am soul enough, rousing to roar
– but will this awareness
alone be the door to implore me to forfeit,
renounce,
and withdraw from
this former attachment
to lapse while I stall,
while in fragments
I catch myself falling
before
I submit to this whiplash of
“worth less” and war,

mauling through self-harm,
rejecting my core.

Perhaps in my rapture
my courage will capture
the thrill of detaching,
unlatching,
resolving;
forgiving myself for my lack of evolving;
for dressing tornadoes I’d wade in,
dissolving,
while anchored by nought but
the grief I was holding
by swallowing pain
– almost framing each frame –
as the slower the memories,
the faster they came and the longer they’d last
it would tighten their hold,
and the closer they’d weave they would blindfold
and frighten,
and once I was frozen and broken,
– eyes widened –

they’d leave…

Perhaps fate will gift me
a shift from my history,
to bask in my victory
and mask my past injuries
and race to new mysteries
and questions,
unanswered,
and answers, un-asked
but desperately fancied
as I take on this task
to have finally been caste,
to have grown from my hate,
to have flown past a place
where my purpose was faceless
to race to a moment I have hungered to taste
in a time I had dreamt of
instead of erased –

to a piece of the peace I deserve,
and a truth to embrace.

Will the aching forsake me at last
and the healing re-take me – its journey as vast
as the path it will trace
to re-shape me,
I ask,
and will it profess to regress to
a time I could heave less,
bereaved less, and
survive long enough to emerge
at my boldest and best?

When it burns, the inferno
turns you into something not
quite finished and not yet
transformed and only
you
know your limits while the world
sits by and waits for its
‘pièce de résistance’ to rise from the
rebirth it gave you
like it had handed you first prize
when you had not yet picked
the numbers.

Your monster wears its party fangs
without asking first,
the current climate
calling for partial nudity and
cluster fucks with strangers who
somehow
drop their unweaned smiles
like crumbs inside the dirty of your lap –
and on and on it goes,
slave
to martyr
to fall upon
deafened eyes and those blind
of learning.

And it burns, this puppetry,
in crowds of pantomime,
grappling
for the melting of your heart;
its wax upon the crutches of
every
mistake
you have chiseled from your chest
to bury alone. It burns, and
you know only how to self-combust and welcome Karma
for you fear it will one day leave without you –
and where would you run to
without those karmic ties to reign you in
or pull you back
or weave themselves inside to commandeer you.

Beneath this sweltering burst of oppression,
soiled and seeded, and
planted by the ankles in concrete shoes;
beneath the heatwave that rides you like you need an awakening;
beneath you – the hotplate – the hot knife – the hotel
embellished with red-black highways,
and roads of bloodshot weariness
raining from your eyes,

you, in party fangs
and crawling upon dusty knees
sear
all over,
in and out
– Karma’s glove –
for anywhere else
but the squalor of this doomed acceptance.

Like this:

I am a glass half full of
everything
I feel seems to swallow me
instead of I
it
is not a smooth rush
down my open
mouth
the words that hurt me again
in ways I will never
understand
what you say before
you open your lips to
speak
through your eyes like I am
trying to do in my
silence
comes in thin spaces
between what you say and what I
don’t
know why it needs to be so complicated
when all I feel is
emptiness
fills me like a glass half full of
impotency
rides you easier than I ever could.

Like this:

There we were
for a moment
awash with candy’d rainbows that shed
spun-sugar silk to dress this call for change.
It’s a pity
this entree tasted like a sundae of fever and fable.
Treasurers, we, to nought, now,
but wingless poetry; of letters, silent
and honest
we’d declined to share.

Like this:

punishment
in the language of hope
scorching its way with splintered paddles
down to the roughs of my hungry feet
and teaching me
equally
of steadfastness and self-love
through the blanketing challenges of escape

Like this:

I scoop this body from its mind, and
on the cusp of extinction, it wails;
insane, lost, romanticising surrender.
Perhaps, my arm the mast, this tissue the flag,
perhaps at last I will tire of this terrorism
and sign on again
for a new amendment of love.

Like this:

By and by,
the past, it passes –
date-raping purpose
through peering glasses;
pregnant pauses never lasting.

Every vanished thrill
restarting futures
on a windowed sill;
shadows casting mimes
in stills as long will live the passion,
hungry,
fueling moments full to brim.

Just as quick, another morning
dawning – time to pass
and kill; murder,
just another constant,
one more loss on
sudden whim as
whereupon man solders on
to play the night another song
for day by day we carry on,
to pass another past
along.

Like this:

I am the starved sanctuary for un-formed words and
by I pass the feverish wind that recipes its way
beyond my teeth to mix another spoon of
awkward with a sifted pound of nervous laughter,
folding and kneading a cavernous desire
that piecemeals its softened voice
into any semblance of oral freedom
my selfishly shy lips will dare untangle.

Like this:

I tire of love and terrorism, the
way my broken heart lay claim
to territory unknown before; the
way the softness of these blankets fall
like bombs in your wake; the
way the hunger for calm strikes and
starves and
feeds in rations; the
way this post trauma stands guard
at closed eyes and
changes sentry as I awaken;
the way it loops itself about my mushroom cloud, and
belts its breath on my cheek. I
tire of scratching at hope like
hope is a trivial blush at another chance. I
grow weary of this kamikaze daze,
my eyes the fluorescence of every wound un-bared. I
ignite from within, limp and lost
from so much exploding without.

Like this:

What remains of our more recent differences, those
saturated words fallen from the lacy cuffs of our noble tongues; the
sound-filled garments and raspy lingerie custom fit
for implication and blame – what remains

but the pungency of battered verdicts, the jesters
of white noise and spicy hung detachment, the
midnight winds of halitosis fouling casted spells:
an alphabetic bouquet of gambled persecution,
the weight of which we transport as we fade away…

Like this:

It is unlikely as you reminisce,
that I,
white as your black is dark,
appear largely unobstructed
in your mind
– stark, as my naked is bare –
a ripening contrast of shadows
raining over my image;
and from where I stand I feel
the wetness
as it pours upon my hair.

Muddied storms rise between us
– a collage of painted quicksand
from my toes to my lungs –
my attention taken from ‘escape’
to ‘survive another night’
for another day;
running at a loss from your black
with my concrete feet
to my canvas of white
from the pain of this confusing grey.

Like this:

Apparently, I died yesterday, but my
last breath was somewhere between March and April
– it just took you another 3 months to decide
that you are the vastness of space
and I am the lungs that are empty without you

Like this:

Your heart is a no man’s land, and
you have fornicated, battle-ready,
with countless minds; The Art of War
alive in your apathetic stare,
a ghostly Sun Tzu in your shadow, and
its pages falling like poetry from your face

Yet, like a Viking, you roar,
axe in hand to slaughter dreams and cut ties;
no art, no honour, and just half the warrior
you claim to be – the septic engraver of
bloody runes and headstone eulogies –
Norse winds carrying the poetry I write of you:
it’s pages never to reach your crimson eyes

Like this:

My spirit needs mending but I have
no coloured thread
to darn these fraying burdens
–
The eye of this needle lay gaping and empty
and I am standing on its edge ready to fall through;
a knot to my ankle and my fast surrender
and I’ll fly deeply in to weave new dreams:
a fresher self with perfect stitching
– an un-perished disaster –
still surviving in spite of her erupted soul

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AWARE 2012 BY TIME ALLIANCE

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